Saturday, October 18, 2014

Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs

I needed a Doc Savage novel for one of my Bouchercon panels, and I thought Port Richmond Books might have one or two if anyone did. "Oh, yeah," owner Greg Gillespie said, with a solemn nod. He ducked into an office and fetched not one, not two, but a box full of Docs and then, before I could pick my jaw back up from the floor, he handed me another armful, some omnibuses, some single-novel volumes, mostly 1960s reprints of the books, which first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. (I bought two books, not two boxes of books.) Port Richmond Books — Your Doc Savage Headquarters.

I also bought 77 Sunset Strip, a novel by Roy Huggins, who created the television series of the same name. Max Allan Collins will discuss Huggins on the same moderated-by-me Bouchercon panel where Sara J. Henry talks up Doc Savage's main author, Lester Dent. Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs.

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The panel in question isBeyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Gary Phillips, Charles Kelly, and Sarah Weinman will join Max and Sara on the panel. See you there.

I took some photos on the way to and from Port Richmond. Can you detect a theme common to my photography ad my shopping?

11 Comments:

Nope, I bought just two books. The omission was not intended to deceive. I thought about buying a few of the omnibuses, but I decided to proceed cautiously, and I bought two volumes that contain one short novel each, including one that bears the cover pictured here. I read about half the book last night. It was an astonishing experience, about which I'll likely put up a post soon.

I'm going to reread some of my Doc Savages before the panel, but for a 11- or 12-year-old coming off Hardy Boys, they were wonderful, and I can probably still recite the full names of Doc's band of friends. Of course I thought it was cool that my dad had read the original pulp versions when he was a kid.

Sara, Doc Savage so far reminds me of a comic book without pictures. Dent was good at maintaining that tone of adventure, and at keeping some sort of action happening in every line, whether against villains, among the heroes, or involving just Doc himself.. And I love the story of how Ham got his nickname.

Thanks for your observations;you're writing my questions for me. If you ever make it up to Philadelphia, plan to visit Port Richmond Books. (Noircon 2014 happens here two weeks before Bouchercon, if you feel like making last-minute plans. An expedition to Port Richmond Books is part of the convention's agenda.

This explains how my reading tastes were formed (warped?): my dad read Doc Savages out loud to me starting when I was about seven or eight. My dad, like Sara's, had read them first in the '30s and bought the Bantam reprints in the '60s. The covers by western artist James Bama on the Bantam covers are superb. Doc, by the way, was the "inspiration" for Superman. Doc had the original Fortress of Solitude and he was known as the Man of Bronze ("Tanned by tropical suns and burnished by Arctic winds") as opposed to Clark's Man of Steel. The novels are great adventure yarns for kids and the young at heart, two of the best being The Sargasso Ogre and The Monsters. Naturally enough, I read Docs to my own son to maintain the family tradition and has 20 or so Docs sitting on his bookshelf.

It would take a great deal of expression for a reciter to bring Doc Savage alive. And I was delighted to discover "The Fortress of Solitude" in my Doc Savage browsing. The novel appeared in 1938, the year Superman was created. I bought it and also "Man of Bronze."

The books seem calculated to hold the attention of excitable young readers, frequently repeating, with variations, the tagline descriptions and epithets for the characters, for instance. My favorite bit probably this observation (about Monk): "He was a Houdini of the test tubes."

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This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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